


liberty is taken

by arepo



Category: La Haine | Hate (1995)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:40:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27133999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arepo/pseuds/arepo
Summary: Vinz turns his head slightly; when the gun goes off, it shatters his cheekbone – but he lives.
Relationships: Vinz (La Haine) & Hubert (La Haine) & Saïd (La Haine)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	liberty is taken

**Author's Note:**

> **warnings** for police brutality.

Vinz doesn’t remember what happened or how. He says, there’s only fragments. The RER ride back from Paris. The train station steps and the closeness of being home. The drizzle. The plainclothes cops and Notre Dame. The gun against his temple. The fear. And then it stops.

“It goes white, then”, says Vinz.

He pinches his ear. His hands are restless by his sides, he can’t keep still, now less than ever. Where once his left eye was, there’s a glass prosthetic. In winter it draws the cold. Sometimes his shoulder catches on the doorframe because he can’t really see in three dimensions.

They’re in Hubert’s room with the window open, although the air’s fresh already. Vinz is sitting next to Saïd on the bed, Hubert leaning against the windowsill. Evening’s fallen over the suburbs in dusk and in light blue. They don’t smoke and they don’t laugh, although they do still smoke and they do still laugh. It’s almost four years later.

“And well, that’s it”, says Vinz the way he used to say it as if nothing ever mattered. “There, that’s all.”

He looks at Saïd, who nods, then at Hubert. Hubert holds his gaze. Then he nods too, slowly, deliberately. _There, that’s all._

It’s a grey morning, the sky almost dull with the colour of cobblestone. It’s not yet six o’clock. Vinz wants to return home, catch some sleep. Saïd tells him a joke Vinz could’ve sworn to have heard already. He must have said it already then, but he repeats, he knows it with a rabbi. He says it out of habit, maybe. Saïd laughs, giddy with fatigue, blurring at the edges.

The police car takes them by surprise. They’re plainclothes, and they stop them almost immediately after seeing them. Saïd freezes, but Vinz doesn’t. Vinz never does. He’s flippant, almost reckless. A stop-and-search, an identity-check, a few words exchanged that are not exactly friendly. It happens fast.

Notre Dame stands a few steps to the side of him. Must have aimed away from him. Pulls the trigger by accident the moment Vinz turns. The bullet goes in below the zygomatic bone. That the bullet splinters off his cheekbone and doesn’t progress farther into the brain saves Vinz’s life.

Hubert pulls the gun on Notre Dame. He doesn’t speak. It’s a policeman’s gun, and the officer behind the car shoots first. It’s weirdly angled, so the shot grazes Hubert’s shoulder. The tension breaks and then it breaks again. He bleeds a lot, but he too lives.

They put Saïd in cuffs. For a few minutes, he’s down on the ground. There’s a lot of yelling now, a lot of noise. They ask for his name, his papers. He hasn’t done anything. Then they release the handcuffs.

One of the officers presses his gloves against the bleeding wound in Vinz’s head, keeps him alive until the ambulance arrives. Vinz is airlifted to a specialist clinic in Paris. But pressure on the brain is too high due to the injury. He’s in shock, but conscious. He speaks to his aunt on the phone: “They say they have to take the eye.”

He’s in a coma for five days. When he wakes up, his left eye is gone.

They open an investigation ex officio against the shooter. Six months later it’s closed. It’s been an accident. Hubert disappears into the penal system for menacing a law enforcement officer, two years and a half in prison, of which he serves ten months. They bring charges against Vinz too, for resisting arrest. It takes half a year, and on the day he goes to court to hear the verdict, he wears a white dress shirt. He’s cleared.

For years, they fight in the courts. He’s tired and his aunt has fallen ill; there’s more pressing matters to take care of. Vinz settles for 225,000 franc in compensation, the first half upfront. There, that’s all.

“Listen, you hear that?” Hubert leans out of the window a little, in an angle that’s almost careless, if one didn’t know better.

They listen for a moment, caught in a shared silence. Someone scratches the discs. A faint hip-hop beat over violins, rap voices. A car backfires down below. 

“It’s the guy from tower B, I reckon”, says Saïd then, pulling the zipper of his winter jacket up. “Doesn’t it get old? He always returns to the same coupla tracks, man.”

Hubert shrugs. He tells them to scoot and sits down on his bed next to Vinz. He rolls them a joint. Against the cold, he says, mother nature’s little helper, against the boredom too. He lights up and takes the first drag. They smoke in silence again. The weed calms Vinz’s twitchiness. They sink into the haze of an early evening, passing the spliff back and forth, a certain gentleness shared in their slowed breathing.

Vinz tells them after a moment that his first memory is of waking up in a hospital bed next to Hubert, who turns to him and says: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“You musta gotten that mixed up”, says Hubert, exhaling. “I wasn’t there.”

“He _just_ wants you to tell him you love him! Don’t keep him hanging like that, cousin Hub”, Saïd jokes, one hand theatrically closed over his heart, and he catches one of Vinz’s loose swings. He laughs.

“Fuck that”, says Vinz and takes a drag. He says: “I don’t really want for anything.” He doesn’t want to think about the shit that’s happened. He doesn’t want to sit down with the Chief of Police, he doesn’t want to hear Notre Dame’s apology. He wants quiet. He wants to be free of it.

The autumn air comes in through the open window, intertwined with the faint music. Vinz passes the joint to Saïd and leans back. In winter the eye draws the cold. Tenderly, Édith Piaf sings _non je ne regrette rien._

**Author's Note:**

> title from sean hart ( « la liberté se prend comme se donne la vie. avec violence et dans le bruit. » ). this is not my native tongue and i don't understand english use of commas, so... there's that. happy 25th anniversary to a film that made me want to take a-levels in french!


End file.
